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Exact complexity of problems of incompletely specified automata

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Abstract

This paper is devoted to the study ofreduction of incompletely specified automata (RISA). A variant of this problem consists in having a set of initial states (instead of a unique initial state) and is denoted by RISS. The problemk-RISAr (resp.k-RISSr) is the restricted version in which the number of states of the reduced automaton,k, and the size of the input alphabet,r, are fixed. We prove thatk-RISAr is in P, whereask-RISSr is NP-complete (and even linearly equivalent to SAT) fork ≥ 11 andr ≥ 2, thus completing the study of computational complexity of problems of reduction of incompletely specified automata and structures.

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Creignou, N. Exact complexity of problems of incompletely specified automata. Ann Math Artif Intell 16, 237–249 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02127799

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